Sunday, 19 August 2012

Going to back door to ask for handout, Omaha, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon. November 1938

Walk the horses down the hillThrough the darkening groves;Pat their rumps and leave the stall;Even the eyeless cat perceivesThings are not going well.

Fasten the lock on the drawingroom door,Cover the tables with sheets:This is the end of the swollen yearWhen even the sound of the rain repeats:The lease is up, the time is near.

Pull the curtains to the sill,Darken the rooms, cut all the wires.Crush the embers as they fallFrom the dying fires: Things are not going well.

Leaving house from which he failed to get something to eat, Omaha, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon, November 1938

Abandoned farm, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon, November 1938

Window in rooming house, Omaha, Nebraska: photo by John Vachon, November 1938

Weldon Kees (b. 24 February 1915, Beatrice, Nebraska; d. 18 July 1955[?], San Francisco, California): When the Lease is Up, from The Last Man, 1943

Photos by John Vachon (b. St. Paul, Minnesota, 14 May 1914; d. 20 April 1975, New York, New York)from Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress
Weldon Kees grew up in Nebraska during the Depression years. He was the only child of John Kees, a prosperous businessman
who ran the F.D. Kees Manufacturing Company (producers of handles,
hooks, cornhuskers and other hardware items) and was for a time president
of the Nebraska Association of Manufacturers; the poet's mother, Sarah,
claimed membership of the Society of Americans of Royal Descent.
At the time John Vachon, a fellow native of the prairie region, took these pictures, Kees would have been in Lincoln,
working on a guide to Nebraska for the Federal Writers' Project.

14 comments:

Wow, thanks for these! I had not seen your previous Kees posts or read him for many years but he's been on my mind lately. His posthumous 1960 collection was maybe the first book of poems I ever bought. They have gained power for me although I loved them then.

What became of the poet himself nobody knows for sure, but a strong hint was left behind in the form of his car, parked and abandoned near the GG Bridge.

Falling through that cold air would probably freeze one's tears and choke one's laughter in the throat (that is, in the unlikely event there remained any tears or laughter mixed in with the black dread and vertigo of the plummet toward the deeps).

Vassilis, thanks very much, that means a lot when coming from someone whose example is an object lesson in what it takes to keep a conscientious and enlightening blog going through thick and thin: surviving the devastations of debt, especially of the kind incurred by the malfeasance and greed of those who hold and brandish power over our lives (that would be the thin)... while harvesting for us all an amazingly generous abundance of natural riches, poems, pomegranates, oregano & c. (the thick).

When the imperishable becomes intolerable, this failed apprentice can only return to the master. Though my Kees collection remains deeply buried (did he leave the keys in the car?), perhaps next to Hart Crane, I am pleased to see that Heaney and Hughes included Kees' 1954 poem "The Umbrella" in their anthology The School Bag. Having given an extended history of the umbrella, Kees ends:

"Over the empty harbor, grey and motionless,The clouds have been gathering all afternoon, and nowThe sea is pitted with rain. Wind shakes the house.Here from this window lashed with spray, I watchA black umbrella, ripped apart and wrong side out,Go lurching wildly down the beach; a sudden gustCarries it upward, upside down,Over the water, flapping and free,Into the heart of the storm."

The men I lostlooked around for Americawithout returning making good ontheir promises to come backfor more piedespite their complimentsI grew suspiciouswhen I glimpsed themreaching for the othersalong the tracks

sometimes I'd see themmornings all stretched outnot a care in the worldthe bottle the paper bag

then I'd go homeand eat the pie myselfit was good enough for mebut I wasn't the onewithout a job